WORCESTER - As rebellion tore apart the Tang Dynasty, the fleeing emperor agreed to have his beloved consort Yang Guifei strangled to placate mutineers in a betrayal that still echoes from China’s golden age 13 centuries ago to modern times.

The causes and consequences of that murder are examined through art and music in “Dangerous Liaisons Revisited,” an intriguing exhibit at the Worcester Art Museum that explores the challenges faced – then and now - by powerful, sensual women.

“I hope visitors consider the two conflicting views of Yang Guifei,” said Vivian Li, assistant curator of Asian art at WAM. “Was she a victim or a villainess?”

To help viewers judge the legacy of the controversial woman popularly considered one of China’s “four legendary beauties,” Li has brought together 25 works from the 7th to 21st centuries, including ancient scrolls, contemporary paintings, tomb sculptures, prints and historical musical instruments to bring alive the Tang Dynasty (618-907) in the downtown museum.

Visitors will see a dozen scrolls, prints and tomb rubbings of remarkable beauty ranging from the 1300s to 1995 and terra cotta statues of a female dancer and a woman on horseback, both more than one thousand years old.

Since Yang Guifei’s imperial husband was a great patron of music during a dynasty known for its poetry and arts, the exhibit features nine marvelously-crafted traditional instruments, including several from the 1800s.

In a “multi-sensory” exhibit that offers rare scrolls that depict music’s polarizing influences as an art for cultivating decorous morality and its contrasting potential to stimulate the sensuality and decadence of Tang court life, visitors will hear Chinese music to get them in the mood.

Whether visitors are Chinese scholars or just occasionally sample spring rolls and Beijing raviolis, this thoughtful show reveals the universal dilemmas faced by empowered, sensual women making their way through patriarchal societies.

“Love and tragedy are the defining characteristics of the story that has endured and inspired across cultures and centuries,” said Li. “…Generations of artists have interpreted this tragic love story from paintings to plays.”

She observed that the ill-fated love between the emperor and his beautiful consort inspired within a century the lyrical masterpiece, “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” by the Tang poet Bai Juyi and the Japanese epic novel, “Tale of Genji” that portrayed the star-crossed lovers in Buddhist terms.

Yang Guifei’s life reads like a dark fairy tale that could be told from ancient China to the Brothers Grimm all the way to modern times.

She was born Yang Yuhuan, with the family name given first, in 719, to minor officials and married at 14 to Prince Li Mao, son of the Emperor Ming Huang (also known as Xuanzong). When his favorite consort died, the emperor stealthily arranged for her to become a Taoist nun to deflect scandal that she was his son’s wife so the 61-year-old leader could make her his favored consort.

Her name, Yang Guifei, is actually a title that means Imperial Consort Yang.

According to historical sources and folk tales, Li said the emperor so favored her with honors and gifts and rewarded her relatives that when a senior military official began what is known as the An Lushan Rebellion, the rebels blamed Yang Guifei for clouding her husband’s judgement.

As the royal party fled the capital, a general and the imperial guard demanded Consort Yang’s death and the emperor reluctantly ordered an aide to strangle her in a Buddhist temple though he grieved her loss the rest of his life.

Li paused by a stunning hanging ink scroll from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 ) that pictures the flight of the emperor and Yang Guifei – just before her murder – riding through jagged soaring mountains depicted in delicate blues and greens that dwarf the impending tragedy about to occur amid the wild beauty.

On a facing wall, she pointed out contemporary artist Peng Wei’s 2015 nine-panel ink painting of a similar scene rendered in the traditional style except she has incorporated Chinese translations of correspondence from three exiled writers in 1926, Russians Boris Pasternak, author of “Doctor Zhivago,” and poet Marina Tsvetyeva, and Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, expressing their shared yearning for human connections through space and time.

“That contemporary artists are as engaged with the tale of the emperor and his consort as their forbears testifies to the strong human resonance of this particular story,” said Li.

By bringing together scrolls of the emperor’s and his favorite consort’s lovers’ doomed flight with happier images of the lovers listening to an all-female court orchestra playing music some critics feared triggered indulgent behavior, the exhibit might remind viewers of enduring cultural suspicions about ambitious women seducing leaders into political malfeasance.

Certainly contemporary Chinese viewers would think of Chairman Mao Zedong’s scheming wife, the once beautiful actress known as Blue Apple, who played a disastrous role in the Cultural Revolution.

On March 16, the museum will host a one day conference, “Between the Sacred and the Profane: Love and Desire in Premodern China,” that explores the intersection of religion, literature and the arts.

Li thinks some of the gender conflicts that doomed Yang Guifei “haven’t changed much from Tang Dynasty, China, to Massachusetts in 2018.”

“Women still have to grapple with social conventions placed on them by gender roles,” she said. “The dual perception about strong, sensual women is still relevant to our times today. It’s a social problem that hasn’t gone away.”